My Colony Became a Living City

Wicked Footnote · Ongoing

Torven has spent three years sharing his mind with three rats. In Ashmark, that makes him neither powerful nor impressive—only the latest bearer of Colony Consciousness, a class infamous for driving its users into rebellion, collapse, or death. His blood can seed fragments of awareness inside living creatures. Every body grants new senses and new reach, but experience is divided across the colony, attention has a hard limit, and older fragments can develop desires of their own. More bodies mean more power. They also mean more voices asking whether Torven has the right to command them. Then Ashmark is abandoned by the city-state that was supposed to defend it. The Harrowing will arrive in thirty days, bringing enough creatures to erase all five hundred residents. Wooden walls cannot save them, and evacuation on foot is impossible. Torven's answer is as brilliant as it is terrifying: build a willing network large enough to transform Ashmark itself into a mobile living organism. To save his town, he must prove that a colony founded on consent can survive where control has always failed—before the Harrowing, the council, or another collective mind destroys it first.